The Hobcast Book Show

We're always on the lookout for ways to unlock the creative juices, and our guest this week, author Cauvery Madhavan recommends an early morning round of golf to set the mood. Born in India, but based in Ireland since her early twenties, Cauvery draws inspiration from both her homeland and her adopted country for her storytelling. The author of four novels, her most recent work, The Inheritance ,...

Over the course of four years of creating this podcast we've noticed certain themes emerge, not least the challenging path many writers take to final publication. Our guest this week, author Roxie Key , is a good example. As she tells us, she faced dozens of rejections from both publishers and agents before she secured representation and finally a deal with HQ for her debut novel, The Deadly Spark...

Regular listeners to The Hobcast Book Show will know how obsessed Adrian is about Sir Michael Caine. So imagine his excitement when he found out our guest this week has acted as the great man's P.R. Not only that, but Peter Berry has represented some of the biggest film, TV, and music stars of the past thirty years, not to mention superstar chef Jamie Oliver too. Now Peter has become an author, wi...

We often get a little giddy when we anticipate speaking to our guests on the show. That was certainly the case when we perused Colin Bostock-Smith's extraordinary list of comedy writing credits: The Two Ronnies, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Clive James Show and Metal Mickey to name but a few. Now Colin has turned his hand to crime fiction. His debut novel, Sting of the Nettle was published by Di...

As you may be aware, we run a short-story competition alongside presenting The Hobcast Book Show and our publishing firm, Hobeck Books. The Henshaw Short Story competition has uncovered many new talented authors, and raised funds to support school libraries. So we were delighted to be contacted by author Anna Vaught who has created The Curae Prize for non-paid carers. There are millions of people...

As we start 2025's run of shows, we thought we'd catch up with one of UK crime fiction's biggest champions, Donna Morfett , who returns to the show for the third time. Donna is a prolific blogger, the founder of The Dark Side of Brighton weekend crime festival, and an author in her own right. In recent weeks though, she's revealed how she's become embroiled in a dispute with a well-known fiction e...

As we return for 2025, the new year has already proved one thing - nothing in publishing ever stands still. It's an industry that is constantly evolving and adapting and facing new challenges. Our guest this week, author and editor Joel Hames , in many ways reflects this. As he tells us, when he released his first novel in 2014 he assumed the world would be ready to embrace it. Now, as an editor o...

We're delighted to be joined this week by crime author Claire Sheldon , author of the Jen Garner series . Published by Choc Lit, an imprint of Joffe Books, Claire has laced her main character's life with a host of secrets and contradictions that threaten her perfect life. With four books published to date, the series offers a mix of psychological fiction and police procedural, and has built a loya...

We've delved into poetry on a few rare occasions on The Hobcast Book Show , so it feels right we explore it again with our guest, Maria Cohut . Maria's most recent published collection is Spatter Pattern , in which she takes inspiration from her love of classic crime fiction to give her poetry a narrative theme and power. As Maria tells us, she wants to explore challenging themes, particularly aro...

We're delighted to be joined this week by multi-award winning author and screenwriter Georgia Jeffries from her home in Pasadena, California. Georgia's career in Hollywood began in the early 80s when she was invited to join the team behind a new cop drama, Cagney and Lacey , after she sent in a script on spec. With countless Writers Guild Awards and Golden Globes to her name, Georgia has recently...

The great American novelist, Sinclair Lewis, was once asked by another writer how to approach flashbacks in fiction. The answer was simple and blunt. "Don't." So what do you do if your story demands time jumps? How do you deal with the complex narrative threads and keep your readers on board? It's one of the issues that our guest, Ben Hawken , faced with his debut novel Chandelier . His solution c...

We've done it! 200 episodes of The Hobcast Book Show ! To celebrate this landmark, we're joined by bestselling crime author Michael Wood , creator of the DCI Matilda Darke series . His twelfth novel in the series, Last One Left Alive , was published by Harper Collins imprint One More Chapter last month. In this fascinating interview, Michael explains how he moved from being an avowed crime fiction...

Never has "truth" been under greater scrutiny than in the past months leading up to Donald Trump's re-election to the Presidency last week. It seems that every side of every debate claims to be speaking the truth, and accuses their opponents of spreading disinformation or downright lying. No matter what the issue, not everyone can be right, can they? So how do you discern what you can believe and...

Every so often an interview will take a truly unexpected direction. That's the case this week as we speak to prolific author Gillian Jackson in her first ever podcast appearance. Gillian principally writes psychological fiction, which to some extent draws on her professional experiences as a therapeutic counsellor working with Victim Support. But as she reveals in this startling interview, she als...

We're delighted to be speaking to Hobeck Books author Tony Gartland , writing as AJ Aberford , in this episode, to mark the release of The Car Horn Revolution - the sixth and potentially final novel in the George Zammit series . It's perhaps the most personal adventure for our accidental Maltese police hero, as the book is set firmly in Malta, and his whole family face danger as geopolitical intri...

Regular listeners to The Hobcast Book Show might be forgiven for thinking that we're obsessed with AI. There's barely a week when we don't discuss the latest encroachment of AI into the publishing world, whether it be machine generated text and covers, or AI mimicking the work of audiobook narrators. Above all, we're concerned about how the big tech companies have ingested copyrighted works into t...

It's been an odd week here at The Hobcast Book Show . Rebecca and I have been watching the BBC's new smash-hit cosy crime series, Ludwig , starring David Mitchell. Nothing unusual in that you might say, but each episode has multiple aerial shots of the centre of Cambridge, where the stories are set. Each time they pop up, I exclaim, "there's my church!". I'm referring to Great St Mary's, where I w...

We'd be the first to admit that when we hear the word "trope", we give it negative connotations. It might be a British thing, but a trope is often equated to a cliche - something to be shunned and avoided. But our guest this week, bestselling author Jennifer Hilt , believes that authors should embrace tropes and lean into them as much as possible. She argues that all celebrated literature is full...

We're linking up with the U.S again this week to meet YA author Jon McBrine . Joining us from his home near Dallas, Texas, Jon shares his journey from graphic designer, illustrator and comic book aficionado to author. His first YA superhero adventure, Unsecret Identity was published last year, and introduces Eric Icarus, a 14-year-old with the ability to fly. You'd think that would be a gift, but...

You've written the book, and found a publisher. But how do you find your readers? Our guest this week, Roger Corke , has taken a meticulous approach to building the promotion around his debut thriller, Deadly Protocol . With a successful career as a documentary maker and investigative journalist, Roger used his research skills to discover how best to promote his novel. Drawing on the advice and ex...

We welcome back author and theatre-automation expert Jamie West to The Hobcast Book Show again this week. Jamie has just published his second novel, Murder at the Matinee , which reacquaints us with playwright and amateur sleuth Bertie Carroll, and glories in the setting of London's West End Theatreland in the 1930s. Bertie is intrigued when a newspaper advert predicts a death in Act 3 of a play i...

It's always lovely to catch up with our guests on The Hobcast Book Show . We first spoke to author J.M. Simpson on episode #103, and eighty-seven episodes later she's back to discuss how Jo has developed her existing Castleby series , but how she's also poised to launch a new crime series based in the Highlands of Scotland and a mountain rescue team that operates there. We discuss how Jo's establi...

We're heading back to Belfast for the second time in three episodes of T he Hobcast Book Show to meet author James Murphy . James is the author of the Terror Trilogy crime series which follow the adventures of Mark Shaw, who inherits Farset Investigations based in the Falls Road. As James tells us, he draws heavily on his memories of growing up in the West Belfast area. His new series will be publ...

One half of The Hobcast Book Show team is a submarine obsessive. So imagine Adrian's delight when he learned that our guest this week, Russian author Valeriya Salt , shares that passion. Her debut novel, Dive Beyond Eternity , is a sci-fi adventure partly set on a German wartime Type 23 U-Boat which is discovered undamaged on the floor of the North Sea fifty years after the war ends. It's an intri...

Just long would you be prepared to endure a difficult marriage? How many years of mind games could you take? That's the dilemma facing Laura in Alison Irving 's debut novel, Casual Cruelties , which was published by Bloodhound Books last year. As Alison is keen to stress to us from her home near Belfast, she is not writing from personal experience, but she did conduct extensive research in creatin...